NACIS 2026

Mapping New Deal Utopias: Dynamics of Neighborhood Mobility in Greendale, Wisconsin
Mia Nighgroh, University of Tennessee Knoxville
Utopian planned communities like Greendale, WI were championed during the Roosevelt administration as part of the New Deal’s efforts to create model suburban communities and facilitate economic stability for low- and middle-income white families. Following the end of the New Deal, the neighborhood transitioned from federal to private funding. Utopian communities like Greendale were designed to promote financial stability, but the shifting economic landscape destabilized the geographic and social structure that had been established. This research examines the dynamics of mobility and sheds light on the migratory strategies residents used to navigate the economic precarity of structural change.

Mapping What Was Hidden: A LiDAR Approach to Unmarked Graves and Land Justice
Spenser Anderson
Kristopher Smith, Local Initiative Support Corporation (LISC)
Accurate methods for locating unmarked grave sites, including ground penetration radar, arborist analysis, and walking sites, are precise but resource intensive. Given the vast number of unmarked burial sites in the States, faster and cheaper preliminary tools are needed. Using LiDAR data and historical records, we have developed a Red-Green-Amber model that enables individuals, organizations, and researchers to screen large swaths of land and prioritize sites for further investigation; thus, improving the speed and reach of unmarked grave site identification. For communities navigating heirs' property disputes, where unmarked graves can both evidence historical land use and complicate title resolution, this tool aids in the fight for justice.

The Geography of Prosperity
Nina Feldman Motivf, Web Cartographer
Tova Perlman, Motivf, Data Scientist
AJ Ashton, Carotgrapher
This presentation introduces the Geography of Prosperity Index, a new framework for evaluating long-term urban success across 250 U.S. cities. Moving beyond traditional economic metrics, the index integrates five dimensions: population renewal, climate resilience, automation readiness, social cohesion, and governance/foresight, to assess future readiness. Geography of Prosperity Index results are visualized through an interactive map that reveals emerging patterns of opportunity and risk. The session will explore the methodology, cartographic design choices, and key spatial insights, highlighting how mapping prosperity can better inform planners, policymakers, and investors about the evolving geography of the American Dream.

Reconstructing a neighborhood through community mapping: Urban renewal in Warren, Ohio
Jennifer Mapes, Kent State University
More than 1,000 U.S. cities lost whole neighborhoods to urban renewal in the 1950s-1970s. Records about the demographics and economics of these places are surprisingly hard to find. This paper describes efforts to document businesses, and later individuals, located in one of these neighborhoods. About 2,784 people lived in The Flats in Warren, Ohio in 1950 before the urban renewal area was identified in 1964. Our research shows that this was a racially integrated neighborhood and that displacements of urban renewal created a more segregated city. This research creates a framework for other small cities to document the individual- and neighborhood-level effects of this destructive policy.

Rooted Out: Gender, Hiring, and Disappearance in the Robinson Cartographic Family Tree
Helen Tosteson, UW-Madison
The Robinson academic family tree traces four generations of cartographic scholarship from a single root: Dr. Arthur Robinson. At UW-Madison, this tree is prized. But a closer look at its branches reveals a striking pattern: women are dramatically underrepresented, particularly as advisor nodes. I present a gendered analysis of the tree, examining where women appear, and where they disappear. Through generational counting and career tracing, I argue that the academic leak occurs through differential hiring into research universities, transitions into government and industry, and in at least one case, outright omission from the tree itself.

Audio Cartography: The New Frontier
Brandon Biggs, CEO of XR Navigation
For thousands of years, cartography has been either visual or tactile. We invite you to join us to learn how cartography can now extend to sound. Learn about auditory icons, ways to hear shapes, understand spatial relationships using your ears, and listen to the world. Through real-world examples and live demonstrations, attendees will experience how audio can communicate iconology, distance, direction, topological relationships, orientation, and environmental context in ways traditional maps simply cannot. We’ll also discuss accessibility, map design, and why auditory cartography may fundamentally be a paradigm shift in cartography, expand who maps are built for, and how humans interact with space itself."

Sound Cartography: Listening as a Cartographic Practice
Nuzhat Tabassum Nawshin, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Cartography has long been treated as a visual medium, but spatial experience is also shaped by listening, movement, and divided attention. In this talk, I review selected strands of sound cartography, from soundscape studies and sonification to audiovisual and locative audio mapping. I discuss how these approaches expand what maps can communicate about place, narrative, uncertainty, and mobile spatial experience, while revealing unresolved questions about design guidance, evaluation, and real-world use. I use these questions to consider how sound cartography might develop as a more experimental and inclusive practice.

What does a smell look like? Considerations for olfactory cartography
Jake Steinberg, The Minnesota Star Tribune
Most maps depict what our eyes can see and the ground we can feel under our feet. But what about the other senses? In this talk, I will discuss a map I made for the Minnesota Star Tribune depicting the landscape of smells — or, smellscape — of the Minnesota State Fair, where the aroma of roasting corn is as prominent as any mountain. Depicting smells visually isn’t easy. I offer a whiff of what I learned from this olfactory cartographic challenge.

Beyond Long-Form Cartographic Improvisation: Composition, Columbaria, Dance, and a Return to the Atlas
Eric Theise
Since its 2022 Lisbon premiere I’ve given 50+ performances of A Synesthete’s Atlas across North America & Europe. Until 2026 these projected map manipulations were typically ~50 minute collaborations with improvising musicians recruited in cities I tour through. This talk discusses recent developments that break with this practice including:
• commissioned, composed works
• site-specific performances
• collaborations with choreographers
• integration with movement sensors
• breaking long-form improvisation into movements, guided by structure &titles taken from atlases
The talk includes extensive video documentation and is complemented by Saturday evening’s performance at Woodland Pattern (see Workshops/Field Trips).

A Thousand Raves: Towards a Posthuman Cartography of Electronic Dance Music Culture
Zach Thorpe, UC Berkeley
Conventional cartographic design often upholds subject-centered logics, leading to maps that represent complex places as fixed spaces. How would one incorporate relationality and becoming within maps to open alternatives to this paradigm? This talk explores these possibilities by outlining how posthumanism can be used as a critical praxis for developing a theoretical foundation, methodology and set of practical applications for a “posthuman cartography”. Using EDM/rave culture as an affective and technologically mediated site of mapping, this research challenges cartographic humanism in favor of maps that attend to becoming rather than being, culminating in an interactive posthuman map.

Earthling Maps: A Locator Map Maker Beyond Web Mercator
Brian T. Jacobs, Habitable Worlds
Earthling Maps is a new way for a broad audience to make locator maps, whether local, regional, or planetary extents, without compromising on cartographic principles. To achieve this, the app uses a novel map renderer that automatically switches map projections appropriate to scale—far beyond Web Mercator and globes—with a fully labeled and highly customizable basemap out of the box. This talk will demo the app and discuss its design and development, detailing the tech used to reproject global tilesets with custom projections in real time. The talk will also cover best practices for producing locator maps that embed and read well on small screens, in emails, browsers, and video.

From Open Source to Newsroom: Integrating a New Mapping System at Reuters
Casey Miller, Thomson Reuters
Scott Reinhard, [email protected]
Bringing a new open-source mapping system into a large news organization takes more than good code. It takes translation between the people building infrastructure and the people making daily graphics. In this joint talk, we'll share two sides of the adoption story at Reuters: the technical work of setting up the system and collaborating with newsroom engineers, and the design work of wrapping it into reusable components for the graphics team. We'll cover the tradeoffs of developer-oriented tooling, what it takes to get something actually used, and lessons learned along the way.

From Global Mapper to MAPublisher: A Production Cartography Workflow
Oliver Normanton, Avenza Systems Inc
Rebecca Bennett
Jessica Vachon
Gabriel Demizio
This talk presents a practical, end-to-end workflow bridging Global Mapper and MAPublisher for professional map production. Topics include layer and attribute preparation in Global Mapper, export strategies that carry styling directly into Illustrator, and importing and refining that data in MAPublisher and Adobe Illustrator. The presentation also covers scripting and batch processing to automate repetitive preparation tasks. Rather than a rigid step-by-step process, the presentation offers adaptable strategies that address common friction points in the pipeline, giving professional cartographers practical tools for faster, cleaner map production.

Preserving the Legacy of USGS Topographic Maps
Andrew Stauffer, U.S. Geological Survey
Elaine Guidero, U.S. Geological Survey
From hand-engraved copper plates to scribed mylar, 1884–2006 USGS topographic maps were paper-based. USGS warehouses hold vast amounts of analog materials, such as manuscripts and film negatives, used to create these maps. Since 2009, the fully digital US Topo maps are produced with GIS software. The 2022 release of topoBuilder enables users to create on-demand custom maps anywhere in the U.S. and its territories with the latest available data from The National Map. Despite the obsolescence of these historical mapping records after the digital transition, we explore their value and efforts for long-term preservation in the National Archives.

USGS OnDemand Topos: How Product Requirements Shape the Design of a Topographic Map Product Catalog
Bethany Walker, U.S. Geological Survey
In 2022 the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Geospatial Program launched topoBuilder, a web-based application which allows users to request and customize topographic maps, referred to as OnDemand Topos. TopoBuilder initially offered a 1:24,000-scale map, called 7.5-Minute Topo. Today, there are four product configurations available, with scales ranging from 1:24,000 to 1:250,000. OnDemand Topos are designed using ArcGIS Pro and integrated into topoBuilder using Esri’s Topographic Production Service. This presentation overviews the OnDemand Topo design process and goals for future OnDemand Topo products.

Unlocking Possibilities With Open Map Data
Jessica Acosta Rodriguez, Esri
The future of open map data is supported by accessible, interoperable, high-quality datasets that fuel innovation and collaboration across industries and communities. As the demand for this data grows, organizations like Esri are advancing this vision through partnerships with the Overture Maps Foundation. By integrating open data from different sources, Overture delivers curated, schema-consistent, and quality-assured datasets, offering a reliable foundation for GIS professionals. In this presentation, you will learn how Esri is leveraging Overture’s data through different basemap products, as well as how you can contribute and have access to this data —unlocking new possibilities for open, creative, and collaborative cartography.

Spatially Optimized Parquet
Matt George, Esri
Jeremy Bartley
Parquet has become the standard for large-scale data analytics, and with GeoParquet and native spatial types, it's quickly becoming the core format for the next generation of spatial query engines. However, visualizing this data on the web typically requires standing up servers in front of the data or converting to other formats like Vector Tiles. Come learn about the new open Spatially Optimized Parquet format, which combines XZ spatial clustering with multiscale quantization. Web clients read Parquet files directly, streaming datasets with billions of features on the web.

galleryofpossibilities: A QGIS plugin for feminist map icons
Meghan Kelly, Syracuse University
Feminist Mapping Collective at Syracuse University
Map icons are tiny, space saving symbols that embed meaning and locate people, places, and stories. Map icons, however, are not “one-size-fits-all” and they (along with their libraries) have been re-envisioned through a feminist lens. The galleryofpossibilities is a map icon digital library seeded by feminist map icons for the city of Boston designed during community-based workshops. Here, the Feminist Mapping Collective officially launches the galleryofpossibilities as a publicly available QGIS plugin showcasing the tools’ features and functionality, feminist development process, research impacts, and future extensions.

You Already Know the Hard Part: Publishing Your Maps with MapLibre
Stephanie May
You already know the hard part of making a map. What's stopping you from building your own web maps is a handful of small, learnable gaps, the ones you keep meaning to get to. Right? Good news. This talk decodes the web mapping stack (data, tiles, styles, hosting) and shows how MapLibre ties them together, so the parts you already know can click into place. We'll make room for questions you've never found the right space to ask out loud. You'll leave with a galaxy brain, ready to dust off an old project or start a new one.

Curating the Pinhead map icon library
Quincy Morgan, Wayside Mapping
Pinhead (https://pinhead.ink) is a next-generation collaborative library of thousands of public domain map icons. Seeded from common icon sources like Maki, Temaki, and NPS, Pinhead brings a standard design language to classic pictograms while adding hundreds of newly drawn symbols and variants. This talk will cover the curation decisions behind the Pinhead library and show attendees how to use Pinhead in their own projects.